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When I first went to the land that we now call Underhoo Wood Nature Reserve, again it was one of those experiences of getting out of the car and a complete sort of a moment of yes, this is it.
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I've found the right place.
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I'm I'm sort of destined to be here.
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Welcome to another episode of Rewilding the World with me, Ben Goldsmith, and I'm here with my friend Jonathan Thompson, who really is a guy living the dream.
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Jonathan doesn't live too far from me here in the Southwest, and with his wife, the author Keggy Caroo, has embarked on rewilding a plot of land that is quite simply magical and one of the most beautiful places I've ever seen.
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And what Jonathan has figured out is that you don't need to have acres and acres, a huge stretch of land if you're gonna involve yourself in the restoration of vibrant nature.
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You can do it on relatively small plots.
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And in fact, arising from the experience that Jonathan and Keggy have had at their plot near Tisbury in Dorset, they're now teaching others on how to rewild plots of land anywhere from an acre up to 50 acres.
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Jonathan, thank you so much for spending the time with me today.
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Ben, just completely brilliant to be on here.
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I'm sort of in the I'm in the shadow of giants.
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I think one of your last podcasts, you had to, I can't even do the maths with this, but you're one of your last podcasts was 250,000 acres, and I've got 25, and I don't know what fraction that is, but anyway, it's just brilliant to be here, and it's it's lovely.
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Thank you.
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Thank you for inviting me.
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The reason why I'm so excited to have you with me, Jonathan, is because people imagine that you really need enormous landscapes in which to restore properly vibrant nature, and that nature is somehow, therefore, away from our day-to-day lives.
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You know, we go up to the highlands of Scotland or we go across to the continent into the Apennine Mountains of Italy or Abruzzo or the Asturias, Cantabrian Mountains in Spain.
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But in fact, the challenge is to weave nature back through the very fabric of our lives, you know, through our towns, through our cities.
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There's no reason why we shouldn't have nature on our doorsteps.
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I think it was it was in Shakespeare's Coriolanus that London was described as the city of kites because there were so many kites flying above the city.
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And in order to do that, if we are to restore nature in the places where we actually live, we need to do it at all scales, at all places in the spectrum.
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And so you're pioneering something that is massively scalable.
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What you've done at Underhill Wood Nature Reserve is something that can be replicated in suburban gardens and in small plots of land, council land, private field corners, up and down the country.
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So I want to start with this, Jonathan.
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How did you and Keggy come to sell up and buy yourself this beautiful plot of land in Tisbury?
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Let me go sort of right back, Ben.
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So even as a young kid, nature had been important to me.
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I had grown up on a very small dairy farm in the North Island of New Zealand.
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And, you know, sort of back then New Zealand had a population of under two million, and nature was at hand.
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And indeed, I joined Save the Whale uh campaign as a 14-year-old.
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So it had always been something that was really important.
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And then as I moved through my adult life and Keggy and I met, we were sort of engaged with nature, but it was through things like, you know, signing petitions, our subscription to Greenpeace, our subscription to WWF, things like that.
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And the more we were reading about, I guess, the planetary crisis, the more we felt dissatisfied with our direction.
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You know, were we actually doing things that were positive?
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And I took a sabbatical for a couple of years from my work to sort of think about how might I get myself back into conservation.
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And in fact, she's one of your neighbours.
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And the real turning point in the story for me was going and meeting Patricia Stanton at Cook's Farm.
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And I was taken to Patricia's, and I was at towards the end of this two-year journey at this point.
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I was taken to Patricia's farm, got out of the door, and I thought, this is it.
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I'm going to completely steal everything she's doing.
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You know, it was at a size that I could I could work, and then all the things she was doing completely fitted what I imagined I would do.
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Yeah, Patricia is an amazing neighbor of mine who is immersed in the world of local conservation here in Somerset.
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She's been involved with the Somerset Wildlife Trust for a very long time, and she has a little patch of paradise on the upper reaches of the brew, orchards and truly wild nature across chunks of it.
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We've been birdwatching there, and there are now signs of beavers, I've heard, on Patricia's land as well, which is exciting.
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That is exciting.
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So that was a real turning point, and then that gave rise to a quest where we looked for land and we had very limited budget, we're not, you know, fabulously wealthy, and it took a while to find a piece of land.
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And it's it was sort of one of that one of those weird things when I first went to the land that we now call under who would nature reserve.
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Uh, I got it again, it was one of those experiences of getting out of the car and you know, a sort of a complete sort of a moment of yes, this is it.
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I've found the right place.
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I'm I'm sort of destined to be here, and that was ten years ago.
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So, what did you find um when you walked on that land?
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Because when you when you get on the train and you head west from London out into these western counties, a lot of the landscape has been subdivided into that kind of iconic patchwork quilt of suspiciously green fields and hedges often quite closely cropped, and a lot of it's very beautiful, but also a lot of it has become quite lifeless.
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You know, don't see a great deal of wildflower colour, don't hear that much bird song.
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What did your patch of land look like when you first arrived there?
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So when I first arrived there, and the thing I I'd looked at Ben, I'd looked at countless pieces of land.
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I I lost count.
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I looked at sort of tens of pieces of land or uh within a sort of you know 30-minute drive of where we live.
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And the things that struck me when I first arrived at at what's again what I now called under Hillwood Nature Reserve were nine big veteran oak trees.
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So these sort of, you know, these are sort of monumental, these trees, and they stick out on the land.
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So that was the first thing that sort of captured me was that.
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And then the topography, so there's a a very nice stream which has not been channelized and it's not been changed, and it's it's sort of in its it's it's in an historical form, I guess, that runs through the centre of the land.
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And I could just see the bones.
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I guess those two features, the topography and indeed the the the large oaks, said to me that, you know, if we worked in a particular way, I could do something with this land and we could sort of bring it back and create habitats.
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So what did you really want to achieve there, aside from just bringing back nature and sitting yourself in the bliss of the bird song and the wildflowers in spring?
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What did what did you really want to achieve?
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Actually, it's it's interesting.
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I don't do enough of that.
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You know, I I really don't.
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I very rarely sit and listen and look.
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I need to.
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I've just read John Lester Cave's most beautiful, most recent beautiful book uh about him sitting in nature.
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Anyway, going back to your question, Ben, it's interesting.
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I had two objectives um way before we bought the land.
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Umce I'd met Patricia and then started doing some thinking and a bit of writing about what do I want this to be.
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And one was, as you described, to increase levels of biodiversity, you know, and create a sort of a mosaic of lands that would then have multiple habitats.
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That was one that sort of nice heterogeneity.
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And then the second thing was uh I have a background in education, so it was to educate and engage people.
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One of the things that I think even back then I was aware of was that people are under-educated when it comes to nature in Britain, and probably globally and in the Western world.
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And I wanted it to become a place where people came to learn about nature, engage in nature.
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And that's really interesting, Ben.
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Ten years on, those two aims, those two objectives are still the objectives which inform everything we do.
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Yeah, and that's how we first met, of course, Jonathan, is when you brought a group of youngsters who are learning about nature here to my place to walk along the beaver wetland.
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And I was struck by the the fascination in their eyes.
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Children just love nature.
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We we all do, but especially children, and uh they don't get enough contact with it in this country.
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And so islands of paradise like yours that are designed specifically to welcome children and teach them about nature, I think are really vitally important.
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So, Jonathan, what was the first thing that you did then?
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You you arrive, you've got this beautiful bit of farmland, I think you said 25 acres, did you say?
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Yes.
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And it's ostensibly a farm, you've got fields, you've got hedges, you've got a few old oaks lining the hedges.
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What are the first things you you set about doing?
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So that we had two major projects in in in the first year, two well, the first sort of 12 months, which spanned 2014 and 15.
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So one of the things that the land had was a stock barn.
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So it was apparent to us that we could clad the stock barn and create a large room where we could have workshops and teach classes and do all that sort of thing, and indeed have somewhere for me to go and have lunch, things like that.
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So we spent about nine months.
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I worked with a builder and we clad the stock barn and created that room.
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And then the second thing we did, and I'd done enough reading, I'd uh there was a fantastic uh organization called the Dragonfly Society, and I'd read their book about the the sort of fundamental importance of lakes and ponds and water, the whole idea of hydrology.
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So we built a small lake, a large pond.
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It's 97 meters long.
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And those were those two projects dominated that first 12 months.
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What about the removal of fences and other man-made infrastructure on the farm?
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It had none, Ben, oddly.
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It's really interesting.
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It's got a ring fence that runs around the property, around the 25 acres, and it was sort of semi-abandoned.
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Again, that was the one of the things that appealed to me.
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So there are some internal fences that I've taken out over time, but there weren't lots and lots of fences for me to remove.
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One of the things that I did inherit was the previous owner, the person I bought from, uh sort of almost in despair, I think, had gone and got a grant to plant a deciduous woodland with trees planted one and a half meters apart, even aged, in swamps, in riverbeds, just completely mad.
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And dealing with those was a significant task.
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I I gave those away.
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In fact, I think now there's a woodland in Froome, which has its its ancestry at Underhillwood Nature Reserve.
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So that that was that was a big task.
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Just clearing the land.
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I didn't want to have a 25-acre woodland of even-aged plants.
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And and what about the the um restoring the natural hydrology of the land?
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Um here at my place at Canwood, uh, all of the fields were underlaid with clay and in some cases plastic tubes in order to drain the water away, and breaking those apart have has been one of the most transformational things we've done, alongside the filling in of the ditches.
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So, yeah, well, that's really interesting.
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So we when we put the lake in, we broke up the the ceramic land drains that ran down a hill into the lake, and they've been partly successful.
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And indeed, recently Keggy and I did a a visit to Wilde's Woodbury and met the extraordinary Rob Farrington, who works for Dorset Wildlife Trust.
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And it's our next big push, in fact, is to break up more of those land drains.
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I've got a mini digger booked for for March, and we all do a big job on clearing more of those land drains and keeping more of the water on the land.
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So we did some of it, but it's interesting how this stuff evolves and you learn more and more.
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That's the thing I love about it.
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I never ever stop learning about this.
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When you you said earlier that you you didn't want your twenty-five-acre patch to turn into just uh a closed canopy woodland.
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And that points to the central thesis of Isabella Tree's famous book Wilding, of the work of Professor Franz Vera, this idea that through the actions of large herbivores and especially wild bovines, the wild bison, the wild auruchs, and their domestic descendants, the native horned cattle and so on, and by their grazing, their browsing, their munching, their trampling, a kind of semi-open mosaic woodland is created, which seems to be, as Isabella Tree puts it, rocket fuel for wildlife.
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So that's sort of what you wanted to achieve.
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But on 25 acres, without those big grazers, how did you plan on going about that?
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Yeah, and that's a really, really interesting question, Ben, right?
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So I run rewilding workshops and I've had a hundred odd people through those workshops over the years, people who own less than 50 acres.
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And there's an interesting perception that rewilding is about shutting a gate and walking away.
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And I talk a lot about the need for disruption and disturbance, and through that, creating those natural dynamic processes.
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And so when you have a small piece of land, you have to be those those animals.
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You've got to be the proxy.
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So, you know, I play the role of the bison, I play the role of the wild stallion, I play the role of the boar, uh, I play the role of the beaver.
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So, and I guess what comes with that is an underpinning of ecology.
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You need to understand, if you're going to successfully small scale rewild, I think, enough of the ecology to understand what does a boar do?
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You know, what does a stallion in its landscape do?
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What does a bison do?
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And understanding that enough then enables you to interact uh with the landscape and create, as I say, that level of disturbance.
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And the other thing about small scale rewilding, it's a lot of work.
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So one of the important things for me at the land at Underhoodwood Nature Reserve is volunteers.
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Um, so we've just had some people down recently, and we've been sort of doing some random hazel coppicing just again to create this disruption, shift light levels, shift the the you know, the the overstory.
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So it's about me being that proxy.
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So I I I love that.
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I love the idea of you as the proxy and and bringing volunteers into the land.
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Um, and today we're all going to be wild boar, or today we're all going to be beavers.
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Absolutely.
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You know, that that's incredibly satisfying work.
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And in fact, it's half-term at the moment, and um I'm down in Somerset with my family, and we've actually played at being humans in the sense that we've all had a pair of secatears and we've been cutting very large numbers of whips off the willow, off the black poplar, aspen, bit of alder, all the trees that you'd find in a wetland environment, and stacked high with armfuls of these little whips, we've been walking among a new wetland, which is part of a Somerset Council funded flood alleviation scheme, and we've been sticking these into the ground, and we've we've planted hundreds, probably somewhere between a thousand and fifteen hundred little whips now, which is nice, hugely rewarding work.
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And so so get getting volunteers out in into nature doing this stuff is is really joyful.
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Can we dwell upon each of those natural processes that you seek to employ at your place?
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How do you be a human wild boar, for example?
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So one of the things that boar do is they they rootle, um, they disrupt you know the top inch or two of the soil, they do lots of sort of churning up, they manage and manage in inverted, comma's plants and uh understory vegetation.
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So what I do in the woodland is a good example, is each autumn before the door mice go into their torpor, and again, this is this thing about understanding the ecology a bit, you have to get your timing right when you're doing this.
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I go into the woodland and I use uh slashes, I use a really large uh hedge cutter, a big, big um piece of machinery, scrub cutter, I use a tractor with a topper, and I use spades and forks with my with my volunteers, and we just disrupt bits uh of the woodland.
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And this is all done on a very random basis.
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I don't have any sort of set areas.
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What it leaves behind is um exposed soil, disrupted vegetation, big bramble stands which uh in shade are sort of reduced, and you know, that is done, and and I don't necessarily do that every year.
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So sometimes I might skip a year.
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It's complete what I try to achieve is the randomness, so there's nothing sort of ordered within the natural world, and somehow I try to get as close to that as I possibly can.
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Yeah, I remember seeing a YouTube clip once, uh filmed from a drone above a family of wild boar in northern Italy doing their thing, rootling kind of fingers of bare earth out into the landscape, and then the same drone, I guess, from the same spot three months later, and it's as if the wild boar have painted colour into the landscape.
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I always find it fascinating the proportion of plants in northwestern Europe that really do need boar if they're to germinate and thrive.
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You know, all the ephemeral wildflowers, the poppies, the scarlet pimpanelle cornflowers.
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You know, of course, after the monstrosity of the first world war, the landscape was awash with poppies because of all the bare earth.
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Um, and and of course, black poplar and some of the trees that we've been cutting into whips, you know, they need bare earth in which to germinate.
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It's one of the reasons why the Purple Emperor has done so well at NEP, the famous rewilding project in Sussex, is because of the pigs rooting the soil and a lot more sallow, which is willow hybrid growing up in those spaces.
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And that's exactly what the Purple Emperor needs in order to uh uh produce its young.
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So you have little armies of human wild boar proxies come onto your land here and there, higgledy piggledy, doing a bit of ploughing and disturbance.
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How do you make a human beaver?
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What do they do?
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Well, actually, that's interesting, Ben, and that's sort of almost the easiest one, uh, actually.
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I started out probably eight or nine years ago creating leaky dams, which you know we all know about, sort of leaky barriers with just you know, sort of uprights and then horizontal, horizontal pieces of wood.
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And I get a fantastic magazine called Conservation Land Management, and there was a a paper, an article in it about three or four years ago about a thing called a beaver dam analogue, where you're attempting to create something that's much closer to an actual beaver dam.
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You know, and as you've got beavers, they have that sort of classic construction where they've got sort of stones and and and uh blocks at the front covered in lots of mud, they've got vegetation at the back creating this sort of superstructure.
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And so we converted the three the three leaky dams we've got at Underhillwood Nature Reserve from leaky barriers into BDAs, beaver dam analogues, and they are remarkably successful.
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And I'll just tell you one really short story, which happened just this week.
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We have had a major pollution event through the stream at the land.
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Hundreds, if not thousands, of tons of sediment has washed through.
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And a young ecologist who, in fact, you know, came and re-surveyed, oddly, we were surveying the stream at the time, has resurveyed.
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And the beaver dam analogue that is closest to the event has no invertebrates.
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The beaver dam analogue that is furtherest from the event has a baseline population.
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And I think that's very interesting in terms of so what have the beaver dams done that have taken the sediment out of that stream valley.
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Yeah, and of course there are beavers now, actual beavers coming back across the southwest.
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They're in Cornwall, Devon, they're in Somerset in good numbers, they're in Wiltshire, Dorset.
00:19:03.279 --> 00:19:14.400
So I guess it won't be too long before those beaver dam analogues attract the real thing, and then you won't need any volunteers, or at least not human ones, to continue the maintenance of those little dams.
00:19:14.799 --> 00:19:16.319
Ben, I just dream of that day.
00:19:16.400 --> 00:19:17.839
I'm sort of dreaming of the day.
00:19:17.920 --> 00:19:21.839
I tip up there, and there's one of those pencil-shaped Nord trees.
00:19:21.920 --> 00:19:25.200
I think that, you know, it would be sort of cracking the champagne open moment.
00:19:25.279 --> 00:19:26.079
It would be amazing.
00:19:26.240 --> 00:19:26.799
Just be amazing.
00:19:27.039 --> 00:19:29.279
Yeah, I had I mean I had exactly that experience.
00:19:29.359 --> 00:19:31.119
You and I have spoken about this, Jonathan.
00:19:31.200 --> 00:19:38.160
But three months after I lost my daughter Iris, um, we found some of those little pencils along the bottom of our valley here in Somerset.
00:19:38.240 --> 00:19:41.920
And you know, we I had my whole family here for m weeks and weeks and weeks on end.
00:19:42.000 --> 00:19:47.119
We we began to call ourselves the grief kibbutz, and no one really wanted to leave, least of all me.
00:19:47.359 --> 00:19:53.920
And I think it was the first time that I really felt a sense of joy and love for the world after this accident.
00:19:54.079 --> 00:20:06.880
I realised that there is a way for me to go on living, was the excitement I felt that beavers had moved into our valley, and I spent the next few weeks, well, you might even say the next four years, scouring for signs of beavers.
00:20:06.960 --> 00:20:11.200
And now, of course, as you've seen, he brought youngsters along to see for themselves.
00:20:11.359 --> 00:20:19.839
It looks like a string of Japanese rice terraces all up the bottom of my valley and absolutely thronging with life, carpeted with wildflowers in the spring and summer.
00:20:20.000 --> 00:20:23.039
The bird song seems to be much more intense there than elsewhere.
00:20:23.200 --> 00:20:26.799
And we've surveyed those beaver dams and they are heaving with life.
00:20:26.960 --> 00:20:39.839
And not just the obvious stuff, the little fish fry and the amphibians and the little frogs and toads and all that stuff, but also the invisible stuff, then the phytoplankton, which is the basis of all the food chain, thrives inside those beaver pools.
00:20:39.920 --> 00:20:49.279
And that's of course food for zooplankton and all those other little microscopic herbivorous creatures, which then, of course, are food for the smaller invertebrates and so on and so forth.
00:20:49.440 --> 00:20:51.279
So the place just sings with life.
00:20:51.440 --> 00:20:59.759
And one of the things that beavers do, of course, alongside the damming up of these little streams, is they bring in the sunlight because they cut the trees back from the water's edge.
00:20:59.839 --> 00:21:03.759
They coppice all these trees that I've been planting around my new wetland.
00:21:03.839 --> 00:21:05.119
So, do you do a bit of that as well?
00:21:05.279 --> 00:21:11.119
Do you cut the material you need for your beaver analogue dams from around the water's edge?
00:21:11.519 --> 00:21:13.519
Yeah, in fact, I've just done some this winter.
00:21:13.599 --> 00:21:16.720
So again, it's this thing of this disruption disturbance.
00:21:16.880 --> 00:21:18.640
So the answer to that is yes, we do.
00:21:18.799 --> 00:21:22.400
And what I do with that is try, and again, it's a very random rotation.
00:21:22.559 --> 00:21:28.720
I I try to take plants out so I get variable amounts of light into the stream bed, but it's not clear falling.
00:21:28.799 --> 00:21:31.200
I do it sort of tree or plant at a time.
00:21:31.359 --> 00:21:35.440
And again, it's this idea that you're mimicking uh the behavior of the beavers.
00:21:35.519 --> 00:21:47.680
And then the other thing I do, and so to answer your question, yes, we use that material to build the dams, and then the other thing I do at at random places is I, as beavers do, is I put vegetation into the stream bed.
00:21:48.160 --> 00:21:57.359
So the stream bed is sort of replenished over time with, you know, branches and boughs of of hazel and and willow and whatever I might be cutting down.
00:21:57.519 --> 00:21:59.680
So again, it's that that thing we're understanding.
00:22:00.160 --> 00:22:03.440
The ecology of the beaver informs how I behave.
00:22:04.079 --> 00:22:14.240
So we've we've talked about two of the vital natural processes that you're seeking to replicate: that of beavers and that of the wild boar, which are of course nature's gardeners.
00:22:14.559 --> 00:22:21.759
What about the grazing and the browsing to prevent your land from turning into one big closed canopy dark woodland?
00:22:22.160 --> 00:22:24.480
You're not going to bring cattle onto your land, it's not big enough.
00:22:24.559 --> 00:22:26.079
So what do you do there?
00:24:05.579 --> 00:24:09.500
The people who've completely smashed this are the Banal Conservation Trust.
00:24:09.660 --> 00:24:12.539
And over the years I've worked very closely with their ecologists.
00:24:12.620 --> 00:24:15.339
We've got a thriving Banow population at the land.
00:24:15.980 --> 00:24:21.180
Somewhere upward of 30 owl that have been born on the land and fledged from the land over the decade.
00:24:21.660 --> 00:24:25.500
And they create, they recreate a thing called rough grassland.
00:24:26.059 --> 00:24:35.900
And the important thing about rough grassland is it's a technical term where you're trying to replicate, as you've described, the sort of grass that you get when you have that extensive grazing.
00:24:35.980 --> 00:24:38.779
You know, something like you've got where you've got one animal for 10 acres.
00:24:38.940 --> 00:24:43.579
So the way that I do that, and they do that, is and it's this is quite technical.
00:24:43.819 --> 00:24:46.940
I cut one third of each field each year.
00:24:47.259 --> 00:24:49.100
So they're on a three-year rotation.
00:24:49.339 --> 00:24:56.860
I cut at 15 centimetres, and that's really important that you don't destroy the thatch, the understory.
00:24:57.180 --> 00:24:59.819
And then I have uh again, it's a volunteer day.
00:24:59.900 --> 00:25:02.779
We do a day which I called underhood wood nature reserve haymaking.
00:25:02.940 --> 00:25:06.299
Everybody comes with a rake and we rake off all that grass.
00:25:06.860 --> 00:25:14.539
And um we have, as I say, the proof is in the pudding, the the the field vole population at the land is just completely off the off the charts.
00:25:14.620 --> 00:25:15.420
It's amazing.
00:25:15.660 --> 00:25:20.700
So we have lots of banners, lots of tawnies, kestrels, buzzards, mustelids.
00:25:21.579 --> 00:25:27.819
What if someone had 20, 30 acres and they want to achieve these same natural processes?
00:25:27.980 --> 00:25:43.660
Uh they don't mind a bit of unplanned or unpredictable mess, and they've got their primitive fence, and so they just decide, look, we'll we'll have a couple of pigs in there for a month in the autumn, let's say, maybe fatteners, and and then we'll send them off for slaughter, or we'll send them back to where they came from.
00:25:43.819 --> 00:25:53.339
Or similarly, they maybe have two or three cows belong to my neighbour, bring them on, have them in the land just for a couple of weeks and or for as long as it takes, and then send them off, having done their thing.
00:25:53.500 --> 00:25:57.500
Does that also work, in your opinion, on a very small plot of land?
00:25:58.299 --> 00:26:04.620
So, in terms of my own experience or our own experience with this, Ben, we don't have a ring fence, and we can't afford to ring fence it.
00:26:04.700 --> 00:26:08.860
Um, it's something I will look at in time, getting to see if I can get funding to do that.
00:26:09.100 --> 00:26:11.980
My answer to that is yes, and it's something I've looked at.
00:26:12.140 --> 00:26:21.259
There's an issue with um cattle, and indeed our our mutual friend Sarah King from Rewilding Britain has just written quite a nice paper on this about herd dynamics.
00:26:21.500 --> 00:26:27.500
So cattle require a minimum of about six or seven animal animals to exercise herd dynamics.
00:26:27.660 --> 00:26:37.579
So if you bring on a herd that's too small, you're not replicating that herd dynamic issue or sort of dynamic for them, and that creates stress within the animal.
00:26:37.740 --> 00:26:39.180
So there's that limitation.
00:26:39.339 --> 00:26:49.100
I think the other thing you have is bringing on animals to the land that then have um uh pharmaceuticals in them, so where they've got wormers and things like that.
00:26:49.339 --> 00:27:01.660
So one of the things I'd thought about doing many years ago was going to a local stable and getting horse dung and bringing that onto the land and trailer loads and distributing that as a way of creating that sort of invertebrate assemblage.
00:27:01.740 --> 00:27:06.220
And as one of the ecologists I work with pointed out, it will have equine pharmaceuticals in it.
00:27:06.380 --> 00:27:14.700
So there's there's quite a lot of stuff to contemplate here about the you know, the sort of the provenance of the animals that you're bringing on, the numbers of the animals that you're bringing on.
00:27:14.860 --> 00:27:17.819
But in in principle, yes, is my response to that.
00:27:17.980 --> 00:27:20.140
And it's something I would like to move to.
00:27:20.779 --> 00:27:24.460
Yeah, I think I think the point about pharmaceuticals is is so important.
00:27:24.700 --> 00:27:33.019
I mean, I I I read recently that a single unwormed cow generates a quarter of its own body weight each year in invertebrate life.
00:27:33.100 --> 00:27:36.460
And we even put a wildlife cam on one cow pat.
00:27:36.779 --> 00:27:48.779
And it's absolutely heaving with with little invertebrates and dung beetles and all kinds of things, and it's visited by frogs and toads and woodcock and all kinds of blackbirds and songbirds.
00:27:48.940 --> 00:27:55.500
So it it's a really important part of the food web is to have cattle and their dung there, but not if they're wormed.
00:27:55.579 --> 00:28:04.460
And and one um natural England ecologist told me that their advice would be it's it's better, especially in wetland environments, to have no cattle at all than to have wormed ones.
00:28:04.779 --> 00:28:04.940
Yes.
00:28:05.259 --> 00:28:13.819
Jonathan, when I visited you last at Underhill Wood, the thing that struck me more than anything else, I think, was the magic of your hedges.
00:28:14.299 --> 00:28:16.299
I don't know if you still call them hedges.
00:28:16.539 --> 00:28:27.500
They're linear islands of scrub, they're kind of fat and provide all kinds of cover for songbirds and other wildlife, and they're, I guess, bounteous with berries and fruits in the winter.
00:28:27.980 --> 00:28:30.539
What's the story with the hedges on your land?
00:28:31.019 --> 00:28:32.620
Oh, Ben, how long have you got?
00:28:32.700 --> 00:28:34.700
Um, we'll have to do another pod for this.
00:28:34.860 --> 00:28:37.019
Um it it that's become a real thing.
00:28:37.180 --> 00:28:40.860
Like that's become something that I've really, really focused on, and for good reason.
00:28:41.019 --> 00:28:49.019
Um so there are a number of beautiful hedges, and in fact, we've just there somebody's writing a book about the hedges, the hedges of the land and the work that we do there.
00:28:49.180 --> 00:28:52.539
Um, and they're dating those hedges at at least 200 years old.
00:28:52.700 --> 00:28:58.940
So these are these are ancient, you know, these are good ancient structures on the land, and there are a number of them.
00:28:59.100 --> 00:29:02.779
And I wanted to do something with them, but I didn't know what.
00:29:02.860 --> 00:29:10.299
And one of the ecologists I work with talked me through a thing called conservation hedge lane, which I've now renamed as rough hedge lane.
00:29:10.460 --> 00:29:14.539
And so every year I hedge lay, do this rough hedge lane.
00:29:14.700 --> 00:29:16.940
I do it in about sort of 30-meter sections.
00:29:17.019 --> 00:29:25.180
I limit it to 30 meters because bats use hedges as flyways and they need those landscape markers.
00:29:25.500 --> 00:29:34.299
And what that gives rise to is just the most that that process of laying them gives rise to the most incredible pulse of wildlife.
00:29:34.539 --> 00:29:38.779
So a young graduate ecologist about how many years ago did Harry do this?
00:29:38.860 --> 00:29:43.980
About two or three years ago, three or four years ago, did uh his dissertation on our hedges.
00:29:44.299 --> 00:29:55.980
And there's the data's quite complex, but sort of rounding all the data up, what we're showing is you get a two-fold increase in invertebrate life in four years, which is just extraordinary.
00:29:56.140 --> 00:29:58.940
And this so this has become something I replicate all over the land.
00:29:59.100 --> 00:30:01.420
In fact, I'm going to do some hedge laying on Thursday.
00:30:01.500 --> 00:30:03.180
I'm going to lay another section.
00:30:03.339 --> 00:30:09.740
Um, and the goal is that I get all those hedges laid before I get too old, because there is a lot of them.
00:30:09.980 --> 00:30:11.900
And once they're done, I can leave them.
00:30:12.059 --> 00:30:14.620
You know, I I probably won't touch them again in my lifetime.
00:30:14.700 --> 00:30:16.299
I'll probably just leave them as they are.
00:30:16.460 --> 00:30:19.980
And I guess you know why a hedge is so important.
00:30:20.059 --> 00:30:30.940
So if we go back to our sort of prehistory when we had this sort of mosaic of scrubland, and indeed, through things like the Enclosures Act, all that scrub was cleared.
00:30:31.100 --> 00:30:34.539
The hedge is a proxy for all that scrubland.
00:30:34.700 --> 00:30:39.339
It's got the hawthorn, it's got the blackthorn, it's got holly, it's got wild rose.
00:30:39.420 --> 00:30:44.620
So all of those plants that were part of that mosaic landscape were gathered up accidentally.
00:30:44.779 --> 00:30:50.380
It's a really interesting accident of natural history to have all those plants gathered up in these linear strips.
00:30:50.700 --> 00:30:58.059
And so, you know, it's this very nice representation, this very nice sort of facsimile for this ancient ancient land that existed.
00:30:58.299 --> 00:31:03.579
And conservation hedge lane just is it's it completely is off the scale.
00:31:04.220 --> 00:31:08.779
I mean, your your hedges are just so different from what we're used to seeing in the English landscape.
00:31:09.819 --> 00:31:17.500
Most hedges nowadays are machine cut, um, which leaves them pretty bare and not great in terms of cover for wildlife.
00:31:17.579 --> 00:31:23.500
And of course, it deprives them of their berries, which only really start growing in the second or third year after they were last cut or laid.
00:31:23.660 --> 00:31:28.299
So this practice of laying them and then leaving them used to be ubiquitous.
00:31:28.460 --> 00:31:29.420
I mean, that's what farms did.
00:31:29.500 --> 00:31:39.180
They cut them and did so on roughly a nine or ten year cycle, and the result would have been these burgeoning fat hedges crisscrossing our landscapes as far as the eye could see.
00:31:39.420 --> 00:31:44.220
For me, I think that's one of the most important parts of what you do at Underhill Wood.
00:31:44.299 --> 00:31:49.819
And for me, that was kind of the magic source with these extraordinarily rich and diverse hedges.
00:31:49.980 --> 00:32:02.380
Although they didn't really look like hedges, they looked like these kind of battleships or kind of they look like kind of they look like kind of linear islands of kind of fat scrub crisscrossing your your beautiful plot of land.
00:32:02.539 --> 00:32:06.779
And Jonathan, when we go walking together on your place, you've always got a bucket of something or other.
00:32:06.860 --> 00:32:15.259
I mean, you're not you're not just doing stuff that is kind of changing the landscape, you're also feeding animals and doing things, which I think is probably part of the joy of it.
00:32:15.339 --> 00:32:18.299
You know, we we do that kind of stuff here in in Canwood.
00:32:18.460 --> 00:32:19.100
Tell me about that.
00:32:19.180 --> 00:32:23.500
What about the meat and the bones and those kind of things that you that you had in your hand when I was last there?
00:32:23.900 --> 00:32:25.420
Well, actually, I uh it's interesting.
00:32:25.579 --> 00:32:26.460
I got this from Isabella.
00:32:26.539 --> 00:32:28.539
I got this from Wildine, um, Isabella Tree.
00:32:28.700 --> 00:32:36.220
So one of the things that she laments in Wilding is the fact that they can't leave animals to to die in the landscape and to rot.
00:32:36.380 --> 00:32:46.700
And then I started reading some papers about the whole role of carcasses and some fantastic books about the role of carcasses and the cycle of life and the role they play.
00:32:46.940 --> 00:32:56.940
And if you look at sub-Saharan Africa, for example, a truly wild landscape, the carcasses play a fundamental role in the driving of those of those ecosystems.
00:32:57.180 --> 00:33:00.620
So it's me being the wolf, you know, it's me being the wolf.
00:33:00.700 --> 00:33:01.420
So I will stop.
00:33:01.579 --> 00:33:12.700
Actually, I had a fantastic experience not so long ago of being stuck on the A36 trying to get a row deer in the back of the car with everyone backed up and sort of, you know, beeping their horn at me and sort of abusing me as they drove past.
00:33:12.779 --> 00:33:16.940
Um and then I bring those animals onto the land, and sometimes it's really interesting this.
00:33:17.100 --> 00:33:19.980
Sometimes I leave them whole and I don't touch them.
00:33:20.220 --> 00:33:23.339
And what tends to happen then is invertebrates move in.
00:33:23.500 --> 00:33:27.259
But if I open them up, sometimes I do a bit of sort of basic butchery on them.
00:33:27.420 --> 00:33:39.500
Um then you get the badges and the robins, and so I put camera trail cameras on them and the magpies, and um and interestingly, you get things like buzzards will come deep into the woods um to scavenge on this.
00:33:39.660 --> 00:33:44.059
So that is something that's become a feature is bringing this stuff onto the land.
00:33:44.220 --> 00:33:49.740
And the interesting thing, Ben, I've been doing this now for eight years, I'm yet to find a single bone.
00:33:50.059 --> 00:33:51.339
So I I never find it.
00:33:51.500 --> 00:33:53.819
These things just completely vanish.
00:33:53.980 --> 00:33:54.940
I don't know where they go.
00:33:55.100 --> 00:34:01.500
I don't know where the skulls go, I don't know where the femurs go, I don't know where the pelvises go, I just never find a single bone.
00:34:01.740 --> 00:34:05.900
It just miraculously gets subsumed into the landscape.
00:34:06.700 --> 00:34:13.259
Jonathan, you you you've started doing webinars and other things to guide people on how to do rewilding at a smaller scale.
00:34:13.420 --> 00:34:26.299
Um I I really urge anyone listening to this podcast to look up the Underhill Wood Nature Reserve webinars and and and to read stuff that Jonathan's written because it's it's fascinating and it's joyful.
00:34:26.699 --> 00:34:52.460
And I think that you know if i if you could just give thought to one thing if you have savings and you want to invest them in something great, you know, a a a big cruise, or maybe a fast car, or the other kind of things that you might buy in retirement or whatever, think instead about buying 10 acres, five acres, twenty-five acres, fifty acres, somewhere not far from where you live, and creating magic in the way that Jonathan and Keggy have done.
00:34:52.619 --> 00:34:54.380
I mean, it is just extraordinary.
00:34:54.460 --> 00:34:57.900
If you're in the Dorset area, go and have a look at Underhill Wood Nature Reserve.
00:34:57.980 --> 00:35:00.219
Uh that they'll probably find a queue at the entrance now.
00:35:00.299 --> 00:35:01.739
It's becoming more and more well known.
00:35:01.980 --> 00:35:10.539
But it's uh it's uh certainly for me, I've been privileged enough to have a slice of land in South Somerset, and rewilding this land here has been really the joy of my life.
00:35:10.699 --> 00:35:13.339
And I know Jonathan feels the same about his plot.
00:35:13.500 --> 00:35:19.259
And um I urge you to give some thought to doing this yourself in whatever scale you can.
00:35:19.420 --> 00:35:27.259
Even a suburban garden is extremely important habitat for all kinds of species, and you can replicate these processes at a very, very small scale.
00:35:27.420 --> 00:35:31.579
Now, someone once said to me that all you really need are dead wood, scrub, and a bit of water.
00:35:31.819 --> 00:35:33.659
Well, add to those some of these dynamic processes.
00:35:33.900 --> 00:35:34.299
That's it.
00:35:34.860 --> 00:35:40.299
Yeah, and add to these some of these uh some of these dynamic processes, and you will create magic, and then you will sit in it.
00:35:40.380 --> 00:35:45.500
And who needs meditation or church when you can sit in a little patch of your own wild nature?
00:35:45.739 --> 00:35:48.459
Jonathan, thank you so much for giving me your time.
00:35:48.619 --> 00:35:50.139
I really love what you do.
00:35:50.299 --> 00:35:51.819
I love you and Keggy so much.
00:35:51.980 --> 00:35:56.139
I feel really privileged to call myself your friend, and I hope to see you very soon.
00:35:56.379 --> 00:35:58.219
Well, Ben has completely reciprocated.
00:35:58.379 --> 00:36:03.419
You're just you're an unrelenting in the best possible way champion for nature.
00:36:03.500 --> 00:36:05.819
And um, you know, I salute you uh for that.
00:36:06.059 --> 00:36:07.659
You know, you do extraordinary work.
00:36:07.819 --> 00:36:08.379
So thank you.
00:36:08.459 --> 00:36:10.939
And and and what a privilege to be put on this podcast.
00:36:11.099 --> 00:36:12.779
Amazing, just amazing.
00:36:26.139 --> 00:36:31.980
Some people are lucky enough to have a bit of land in which they can get busy restoring nature, rewilding.
00:36:32.219 --> 00:36:41.339
Some have got gardens, and Jonathan here has really been a pioneer of figuring out how to rewild such areas, and what a joy it is to have heard him describe it.
00:36:41.500 --> 00:36:43.500
But everyone can get involved in rewilding.
00:36:43.579 --> 00:36:46.699
There's loads of opportunities to volunteer and participate near you.
00:36:46.779 --> 00:36:48.779
Just look for them and you'll find them.
00:36:49.419 --> 00:36:56.939
If you've enjoyed the episode, please go onto whatever platform you use, give us a like, share it with your friends, it all makes a big difference.
00:36:57.099 --> 00:36:57.980
Thank you.
00:37:01.339 --> 00:37:13.980
In the next episode, I'm going to be talking to Melpo Apostoledu from Bird Life Cyprus, specifically about Melpo's project to reintroduce Griffon vultures to the island of Cyprus, bringing them in crates from Spain.
00:37:14.059 --> 00:37:15.259
It's an amazing project.
00:37:15.339 --> 00:37:16.859
I hope you'll join us.
00:00:00.080 --> 00:00:08.800
When I first went to the land that we now call Underhoo Wood Nature Reserve, again it was one of those experiences of getting out of the car and a complete sort of a moment of yes, this is it.
00:00:08.960 --> 00:00:09.919
I've found the right place.
00:00:10.000 --> 00:00:12.400
I'm I'm sort of destined to be here.
00:00:18.160 --> 00:00:26.960
Welcome to another episode of Rewilding the World with me, Ben Goldsmith, and I'm here with my friend Jonathan Thompson, who really is a guy living the dream.
00:00:27.199 --> 00:00:40.000
Jonathan doesn't live too far from me here in the Southwest, and with his wife, the author Keggy Caroo, has embarked on rewilding a plot of land that is quite simply magical and one of the most beautiful places I've ever seen.
00:00:40.159 --> 00:00:49.679
And what Jonathan has figured out is that you don't need to have acres and acres, a huge stretch of land if you're gonna involve yourself in the restoration of vibrant nature.
00:00:49.840 --> 00:00:52.000
You can do it on relatively small plots.
00:00:52.079 --> 00:01:03.439
And in fact, arising from the experience that Jonathan and Keggy have had at their plot near Tisbury in Dorset, they're now teaching others on how to rewild plots of land anywhere from an acre up to 50 acres.
00:01:03.600 --> 00:01:06.879
Jonathan, thank you so much for spending the time with me today.
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Ben, just completely brilliant to be on here.
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I'm sort of in the I'm in the shadow of giants.
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I think one of your last podcasts, you had to, I can't even do the maths with this, but you're one of your last podcasts was 250,000 acres, and I've got 25, and I don't know what fraction that is, but anyway, it's just brilliant to be here, and it's it's lovely.
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Thank you.
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Thank you for inviting me.
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The reason why I'm so excited to have you with me, Jonathan, is because people imagine that you really need enormous landscapes in which to restore properly vibrant nature, and that nature is somehow, therefore, away from our day-to-day lives.
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You know, we go up to the highlands of Scotland or we go across to the continent into the Apennine Mountains of Italy or Abruzzo or the Asturias, Cantabrian Mountains in Spain.
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But in fact, the challenge is to weave nature back through the very fabric of our lives, you know, through our towns, through our cities.
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There's no reason why we shouldn't have nature on our doorsteps.
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I think it was it was in Shakespeare's Coriolanus that London was described as the city of kites because there were so many kites flying above the city.
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And in order to do that, if we are to restore nature in the places where we actually live, we need to do it at all scales, at all places in the spectrum.
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And so you're pioneering something that is massively scalable.
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What you've done at Underhill Wood Nature Reserve is something that can be replicated in suburban gardens and in small plots of land, council land, private field corners, up and down the country.
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So I want to start with this, Jonathan.
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How did you and Keggy come to sell up and buy yourself this beautiful plot of land in Tisbury?
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Let me go sort of right back, Ben.
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So even as a young kid, nature had been important to me.
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I had grown up on a very small dairy farm in the North Island of New Zealand.
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And, you know, sort of back then New Zealand had a population of under two million, and nature was at hand.
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And indeed, I joined Save the Whale uh campaign as a 14-year-old.
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So it had always been something that was really important.
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And then as I moved through my adult life and Keggy and I met, we were sort of engaged with nature, but it was through things like, you know, signing petitions, our subscription to Greenpeace, our subscription to WWF, things like that.
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And the more we were reading about, I guess, the planetary crisis, the more we felt dissatisfied with our direction.
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You know, were we actually doing things that were positive?
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And I took a sabbatical for a couple of years from my work to sort of think about how might I get myself back into conservation.
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And in fact, she's one of your neighbours.
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And the real turning point in the story for me was going and meeting Patricia Stanton at Cook's Farm.
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And I was taken to Patricia's, and I was at towards the end of this two-year journey at this point.
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I was taken to Patricia's farm, got out of the door, and I thought, this is it.
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I'm going to completely steal everything she's doing.
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You know, it was at a size that I could I could work, and then all the things she was doing completely fitted what I imagined I would do.
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Yeah, Patricia is an amazing neighbor of mine who is immersed in the world of local conservation here in Somerset.
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She's been involved with the Somerset Wildlife Trust for a very long time, and she has a little patch of paradise on the upper reaches of the brew, orchards and truly wild nature across chunks of it.
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We've been birdwatching there, and there are now signs of beavers, I've heard, on Patricia's land as well, which is exciting.
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That is exciting.
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So that was a real turning point, and then that gave rise to a quest where we looked for land and we had very limited budget, we're not, you know, fabulously wealthy, and it took a while to find a piece of land.
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And it's it was sort of one of that one of those weird things when I first went to the land that we now call under who would nature reserve.
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Uh, I got it again, it was one of those experiences of getting out of the car and you know, a sort of a complete sort of a moment of yes, this is it.
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I've found the right place.
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I'm I'm sort of destined to be here, and that was ten years ago.
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So, what did you find um when you walked on that land?
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Because when you when you get on the train and you head west from London out into these western counties, a lot of the landscape has been subdivided into that kind of iconic patchwork quilt of suspiciously green fields and hedges often quite closely cropped, and a lot of it's very beautiful, but also a lot of it has become quite lifeless.
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You know, don't see a great deal of wildflower colour, don't hear that much bird song.
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What did your patch of land look like when you first arrived there?
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So when I first arrived there, and the thing I I'd looked at Ben, I'd looked at countless pieces of land.
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I I lost count.
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I looked at sort of tens of pieces of land or uh within a sort of you know 30-minute drive of where we live.
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And the things that struck me when I first arrived at at what's again what I now called under Hillwood Nature Reserve were nine big veteran oak trees.
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So these sort of, you know, these are sort of monumental, these trees, and they stick out on the land.
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So that was the first thing that sort of captured me was that.
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And then the topography, so there's a a very nice stream which has not been channelized and it's not been changed, and it's it's sort of in its it's it's in an historical form, I guess, that runs through the centre of the land.
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And I could just see the bones.
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I guess those two features, the topography and indeed the the the large oaks, said to me that, you know, if we worked in a particular way, I could do something with this land and we could sort of bring it back and create habitats.
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So what did you really want to achieve there, aside from just bringing back nature and sitting yourself in the bliss of the bird song and the wildflowers in spring?
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What did what did you really want to achieve?
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Actually, it's it's interesting.
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I don't do enough of that.
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You know, I I really don't.
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I very rarely sit and listen and look.
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I need to.
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I've just read John Lester Cave's most beautiful, most recent beautiful book uh about him sitting in nature.
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Anyway, going back to your question, Ben, it's interesting.
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I had two objectives um way before we bought the land.
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Umce I'd met Patricia and then started doing some thinking and a bit of writing about what do I want this to be.
00:07:05.759 --> 00:07:15.439
And one was, as you described, to increase levels of biodiversity, you know, and create a sort of a mosaic of lands that would then have multiple habitats.
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That was one that sort of nice heterogeneity.
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And then the second thing was uh I have a background in education, so it was to educate and engage people.
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One of the things that I think even back then I was aware of was that people are under-educated when it comes to nature in Britain, and probably globally and in the Western world.
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And I wanted it to become a place where people came to learn about nature, engage in nature.
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And that's really interesting, Ben.
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Ten years on, those two aims, those two objectives are still the objectives which inform everything we do.
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Yeah, and that's how we first met, of course, Jonathan, is when you brought a group of youngsters who are learning about nature here to my place to walk along the beaver wetland.
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And I was struck by the the fascination in their eyes.
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Children just love nature.
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We we all do, but especially children, and uh they don't get enough contact with it in this country.
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And so islands of paradise like yours that are designed specifically to welcome children and teach them about nature, I think are really vitally important.
00:08:18.160 --> 00:08:20.720
So, Jonathan, what was the first thing that you did then?
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You you arrive, you've got this beautiful bit of farmland, I think you said 25 acres, did you say?
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Yes.
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And it's ostensibly a farm, you've got fields, you've got hedges, you've got a few old oaks lining the hedges.
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What are the first things you you set about doing?
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So that we had two major projects in in in the first year, two well, the first sort of 12 months, which spanned 2014 and 15.
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So one of the things that the land had was a stock barn.
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So it was apparent to us that we could clad the stock barn and create a large room where we could have workshops and teach classes and do all that sort of thing, and indeed have somewhere for me to go and have lunch, things like that.
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So we spent about nine months.
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I worked with a builder and we clad the stock barn and created that room.
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And then the second thing we did, and I'd done enough reading, I'd uh there was a fantastic uh organization called the Dragonfly Society, and I'd read their book about the the sort of fundamental importance of lakes and ponds and water, the whole idea of hydrology.
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So we built a small lake, a large pond.
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It's 97 meters long.
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And those were those two projects dominated that first 12 months.
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What about the removal of fences and other man-made infrastructure on the farm?
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It had none, Ben, oddly.
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It's really interesting.
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It's got a ring fence that runs around the property, around the 25 acres, and it was sort of semi-abandoned.
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Again, that was the one of the things that appealed to me.
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So there are some internal fences that I've taken out over time, but there weren't lots and lots of fences for me to remove.
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One of the things that I did inherit was the previous owner, the person I bought from, uh sort of almost in despair, I think, had gone and got a grant to plant a deciduous woodland with trees planted one and a half meters apart, even aged, in swamps, in riverbeds, just completely mad.
00:10:09.440 --> 00:10:12.399
And dealing with those was a significant task.
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I I gave those away.
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In fact, I think now there's a woodland in Froome, which has its its ancestry at Underhillwood Nature Reserve.
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So that that was that was a big task.
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Just clearing the land.
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I didn't want to have a 25-acre woodland of even-aged plants.
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And and what about the the um restoring the natural hydrology of the land?
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Um here at my place at Canwood, uh, all of the fields were underlaid with clay and in some cases plastic tubes in order to drain the water away, and breaking those apart have has been one of the most transformational things we've done, alongside the filling in of the ditches.
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So, yeah, well, that's really interesting.
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So we when we put the lake in, we broke up the the ceramic land drains that ran down a hill into the lake, and they've been partly successful.
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And indeed, recently Keggy and I did a a visit to Wilde's Woodbury and met the extraordinary Rob Farrington, who works for Dorset Wildlife Trust.
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And it's our next big push, in fact, is to break up more of those land drains.
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I've got a mini digger booked for for March, and we all do a big job on clearing more of those land drains and keeping more of the water on the land.
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So we did some of it, but it's interesting how this stuff evolves and you learn more and more.
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That's the thing I love about it.
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I never ever stop learning about this.
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When you you said earlier that you you didn't want your twenty-five-acre patch to turn into just uh a closed canopy woodland.
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And that points to the central thesis of Isabella Tree's famous book Wilding, of the work of Professor Franz Vera, this idea that through the actions of large herbivores and especially wild bovines, the wild bison, the wild auruchs, and their domestic descendants, the native horned cattle and so on, and by their grazing, their browsing, their munching, their trampling, a kind of semi-open mosaic woodland is created, which seems to be, as Isabella Tree puts it, rocket fuel for wildlife.
00:12:07.360 --> 00:12:09.279
So that's sort of what you wanted to achieve.
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But on 25 acres, without those big grazers, how did you plan on going about that?
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Yeah, and that's a really, really interesting question, Ben, right?
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So I run rewilding workshops and I've had a hundred odd people through those workshops over the years, people who own less than 50 acres.
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And there's an interesting perception that rewilding is about shutting a gate and walking away.
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And I talk a lot about the need for disruption and disturbance, and through that, creating those natural dynamic processes.
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And so when you have a small piece of land, you have to be those those animals.
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You've got to be the proxy.
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So, you know, I play the role of the bison, I play the role of the wild stallion, I play the role of the boar, uh, I play the role of the beaver.
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So, and I guess what comes with that is an underpinning of ecology.
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You need to understand, if you're going to successfully small scale rewild, I think, enough of the ecology to understand what does a boar do?
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You know, what does a stallion in its landscape do?
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What does a bison do?
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And understanding that enough then enables you to interact uh with the landscape and create, as I say, that level of disturbance.
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And the other thing about small scale rewilding, it's a lot of work.
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So one of the important things for me at the land at Underhoodwood Nature Reserve is volunteers.
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Um, so we've just had some people down recently, and we've been sort of doing some random hazel coppicing just again to create this disruption, shift light levels, shift the the you know, the the overstory.
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So it's about me being that proxy.
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So I I I love that.
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I love the idea of you as the proxy and and bringing volunteers into the land.
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Um, and today we're all going to be wild boar, or today we're all going to be beavers.
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Absolutely.
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You know, that that's incredibly satisfying work.
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And in fact, it's half-term at the moment, and um I'm down in Somerset with my family, and we've actually played at being humans in the sense that we've all had a pair of secatears and we've been cutting very large numbers of whips off the willow, off the black poplar, aspen, bit of alder, all the trees that you'd find in a wetland environment, and stacked high with armfuls of these little whips, we've been walking among a new wetland, which is part of a Somerset Council funded flood alleviation scheme, and we've been sticking these into the ground, and we've we've planted hundreds, probably somewhere between a thousand and fifteen hundred little whips now, which is nice, hugely rewarding work.
00:14:32.879 --> 00:14:38.399
And so so get getting volunteers out in into nature doing this stuff is is really joyful.
00:14:38.720 --> 00:14:44.639
Can we dwell upon each of those natural processes that you seek to employ at your place?
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How do you be a human wild boar, for example?
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So one of the things that boar do is they they rootle, um, they disrupt you know the top inch or two of the soil, they do lots of sort of churning up, they manage and manage in inverted, comma's plants and uh understory vegetation.
00:15:02.480 --> 00:15:13.279
So what I do in the woodland is a good example, is each autumn before the door mice go into their torpor, and again, this is this thing about understanding the ecology a bit, you have to get your timing right when you're doing this.
00:15:13.519 --> 00:15:31.039
I go into the woodland and I use uh slashes, I use a really large uh hedge cutter, a big, big um piece of machinery, scrub cutter, I use a tractor with a topper, and I use spades and forks with my with my volunteers, and we just disrupt bits uh of the woodland.
00:15:31.120 --> 00:15:33.360
And this is all done on a very random basis.
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I don't have any sort of set areas.
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What it leaves behind is um exposed soil, disrupted vegetation, big bramble stands which uh in shade are sort of reduced, and you know, that is done, and and I don't necessarily do that every year.
00:15:50.480 --> 00:15:52.240
So sometimes I might skip a year.
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It's complete what I try to achieve is the randomness, so there's nothing sort of ordered within the natural world, and somehow I try to get as close to that as I possibly can.
00:16:03.200 --> 00:16:22.480
Yeah, I remember seeing a YouTube clip once, uh filmed from a drone above a family of wild boar in northern Italy doing their thing, rootling kind of fingers of bare earth out into the landscape, and then the same drone, I guess, from the same spot three months later, and it's as if the wild boar have painted colour into the landscape.
00:16:22.720 --> 00:16:29.440
I always find it fascinating the proportion of plants in northwestern Europe that really do need boar if they're to germinate and thrive.
00:16:29.519 --> 00:16:34.159
You know, all the ephemeral wildflowers, the poppies, the scarlet pimpanelle cornflowers.
00:16:34.240 --> 00:16:40.639
You know, of course, after the monstrosity of the first world war, the landscape was awash with poppies because of all the bare earth.
00:16:40.720 --> 00:16:46.559
Um, and and of course, black poplar and some of the trees that we've been cutting into whips, you know, they need bare earth in which to germinate.
00:16:46.639 --> 00:16:58.320
It's one of the reasons why the Purple Emperor has done so well at NEP, the famous rewilding project in Sussex, is because of the pigs rooting the soil and a lot more sallow, which is willow hybrid growing up in those spaces.
00:16:58.399 --> 00:17:03.039
And that's exactly what the Purple Emperor needs in order to uh uh produce its young.
00:17:03.679 --> 00:17:12.000
So you have little armies of human wild boar proxies come onto your land here and there, higgledy piggledy, doing a bit of ploughing and disturbance.
00:17:12.240 --> 00:17:13.839
How do you make a human beaver?
00:17:14.000 --> 00:17:15.039
What do they do?
00:17:15.440 --> 00:17:19.839
Well, actually, that's interesting, Ben, and that's sort of almost the easiest one, uh, actually.
00:17:20.079 --> 00:17:31.680
I started out probably eight or nine years ago creating leaky dams, which you know we all know about, sort of leaky barriers with just you know, sort of uprights and then horizontal, horizontal pieces of wood.
00:17:31.839 --> 00:17:46.799
And I get a fantastic magazine called Conservation Land Management, and there was a a paper, an article in it about three or four years ago about a thing called a beaver dam analogue, where you're attempting to create something that's much closer to an actual beaver dam.
00:17:47.200 --> 00:17:59.920
You know, and as you've got beavers, they have that sort of classic construction where they've got sort of stones and and and uh blocks at the front covered in lots of mud, they've got vegetation at the back creating this sort of superstructure.
00:18:00.160 --> 00:18:13.440
And so we converted the three the three leaky dams we've got at Underhillwood Nature Reserve from leaky barriers into BDAs, beaver dam analogues, and they are remarkably successful.
00:18:13.599 --> 00:18:17.839
And I'll just tell you one really short story, which happened just this week.
00:18:18.079 --> 00:18:21.920
We have had a major pollution event through the stream at the land.
00:18:22.160 --> 00:18:25.920
Hundreds, if not thousands, of tons of sediment has washed through.
00:18:26.160 --> 00:18:34.240
And a young ecologist who, in fact, you know, came and re-surveyed, oddly, we were surveying the stream at the time, has resurveyed.
00:18:34.480 --> 00:18:40.400
And the beaver dam analogue that is closest to the event has no invertebrates.
00:18:40.480 --> 00:18:46.559
The beaver dam analogue that is furtherest from the event has a baseline population.
00:18:46.880 --> 00:18:53.359
And I think that's very interesting in terms of so what have the beaver dams done that have taken the sediment out of that stream valley.
00:18:53.599 --> 00:18:58.319
Yeah, and of course there are beavers now, actual beavers coming back across the southwest.
00:18:58.400 --> 00:19:03.200
They're in Cornwall, Devon, they're in Somerset in good numbers, they're in Wiltshire, Dorset.
00:19:03.279 --> 00:19:14.400
So I guess it won't be too long before those beaver dam analogues attract the real thing, and then you won't need any volunteers, or at least not human ones, to continue the maintenance of those little dams.
00:19:14.799 --> 00:19:16.319
Ben, I just dream of that day.
00:19:16.400 --> 00:19:17.839
I'm sort of dreaming of the day.
00:19:17.920 --> 00:19:21.839
I tip up there, and there's one of those pencil-shaped Nord trees.
00:19:21.920 --> 00:19:25.200
I think that, you know, it would be sort of cracking the champagne open moment.
00:19:25.279 --> 00:19:26.079
It would be amazing.
00:19:26.240 --> 00:19:26.799
Just be amazing.
00:19:27.039 --> 00:19:29.279
Yeah, I had I mean I had exactly that experience.
00:19:29.359 --> 00:19:31.119
You and I have spoken about this, Jonathan.
00:19:31.200 --> 00:19:38.160
But three months after I lost my daughter Iris, um, we found some of those little pencils along the bottom of our valley here in Somerset.
00:19:38.240 --> 00:19:41.920
And you know, we I had my whole family here for m weeks and weeks and weeks on end.
00:19:42.000 --> 00:19:47.119
We we began to call ourselves the grief kibbutz, and no one really wanted to leave, least of all me.
00:19:47.359 --> 00:19:53.920
And I think it was the first time that I really felt a sense of joy and love for the world after this accident.
00:19:54.079 --> 00:20:06.880
I realised that there is a way for me to go on living, was the excitement I felt that beavers had moved into our valley, and I spent the next few weeks, well, you might even say the next four years, scouring for signs of beavers.
00:20:06.960 --> 00:20:11.200
And now, of course, as you've seen, he brought youngsters along to see for themselves.
00:20:11.359 --> 00:20:19.839
It looks like a string of Japanese rice terraces all up the bottom of my valley and absolutely thronging with life, carpeted with wildflowers in the spring and summer.
00:20:20.000 --> 00:20:23.039
The bird song seems to be much more intense there than elsewhere.
00:20:23.200 --> 00:20:26.799
And we've surveyed those beaver dams and they are heaving with life.
00:20:26.960 --> 00:20:39.839
And not just the obvious stuff, the little fish fry and the amphibians and the little frogs and toads and all that stuff, but also the invisible stuff, then the phytoplankton, which is the basis of all the food chain, thrives inside those beaver pools.
00:20:39.920 --> 00:20:49.279
And that's of course food for zooplankton and all those other little microscopic herbivorous creatures, which then, of course, are food for the smaller invertebrates and so on and so forth.
00:20:49.440 --> 00:20:51.279
So the place just sings with life.
00:20:51.440 --> 00:20:59.759
And one of the things that beavers do, of course, alongside the damming up of these little streams, is they bring in the sunlight because they cut the trees back from the water's edge.
00:20:59.839 --> 00:21:03.759
They coppice all these trees that I've been planting around my new wetland.
00:21:03.839 --> 00:21:05.119
So, do you do a bit of that as well?
00:21:05.279 --> 00:21:11.119
Do you cut the material you need for your beaver analogue dams from around the water's edge?
00:21:11.519 --> 00:21:13.519
Yeah, in fact, I've just done some this winter.
00:21:13.599 --> 00:21:16.720
So again, it's this thing of this disruption disturbance.
00:21:16.880 --> 00:21:18.640
So the answer to that is yes, we do.
00:21:18.799 --> 00:21:22.400
And what I do with that is try, and again, it's a very random rotation.
00:21:22.559 --> 00:21:28.720
I I try to take plants out so I get variable amounts of light into the stream bed, but it's not clear falling.
00:21:28.799 --> 00:21:31.200
I do it sort of tree or plant at a time.
00:21:31.359 --> 00:21:35.440
And again, it's this idea that you're mimicking uh the behavior of the beavers.
00:21:35.519 --> 00:21:47.680
And then the other thing I do, and so to answer your question, yes, we use that material to build the dams, and then the other thing I do at at random places is I, as beavers do, is I put vegetation into the stream bed.
00:21:48.160 --> 00:21:57.359
So the stream bed is sort of replenished over time with, you know, branches and boughs of of hazel and and willow and whatever I might be cutting down.
00:21:57.519 --> 00:21:59.680
So again, it's that that thing we're understanding.
00:22:00.160 --> 00:22:03.440
The ecology of the beaver informs how I behave.
00:22:04.079 --> 00:22:14.240
So we've we've talked about two of the vital natural processes that you're seeking to replicate: that of beavers and that of the wild boar, which are of course nature's gardeners.
00:22:14.559 --> 00:22:21.759
What about the grazing and the browsing to prevent your land from turning into one big closed canopy dark woodland?
00:22:22.160 --> 00:22:24.480
You're not going to bring cattle onto your land, it's not big enough.
00:22:24.559 --> 00:22:26.079
So what do you do there?
00:24:05.579 --> 00:24:09.500
The people who've completely smashed this are the Banal Conservation Trust.
00:24:09.660 --> 00:24:12.539
And over the years I've worked very closely with their ecologists.
00:24:12.620 --> 00:24:15.339
We've got a thriving Banow population at the land.
00:24:15.980 --> 00:24:21.180
Somewhere upward of 30 owl that have been born on the land and fledged from the land over the decade.
00:24:21.660 --> 00:24:25.500
And they create, they recreate a thing called rough grassland.
00:24:26.059 --> 00:24:35.900
And the important thing about rough grassland is it's a technical term where you're trying to replicate, as you've described, the sort of grass that you get when you have that extensive grazing.
00:24:35.980 --> 00:24:38.779
You know, something like you've got where you've got one animal for 10 acres.
00:24:38.940 --> 00:24:43.579
So the way that I do that, and they do that, is and it's this is quite technical.
00:24:43.819 --> 00:24:46.940
I cut one third of each field each year.
00:24:47.259 --> 00:24:49.100
So they're on a three-year rotation.
00:24:49.339 --> 00:24:56.860
I cut at 15 centimetres, and that's really important that you don't destroy the thatch, the understory.
00:24:57.180 --> 00:24:59.819
And then I have uh again, it's a volunteer day.
00:24:59.900 --> 00:25:02.779
We do a day which I called underhood wood nature reserve haymaking.
00:25:02.940 --> 00:25:06.299
Everybody comes with a rake and we rake off all that grass.
00:25:06.860 --> 00:25:14.539
And um we have, as I say, the proof is in the pudding, the the the field vole population at the land is just completely off the off the charts.
00:25:14.620 --> 00:25:15.420
It's amazing.
00:25:15.660 --> 00:25:20.700
So we have lots of banners, lots of tawnies, kestrels, buzzards, mustelids.
00:25:21.579 --> 00:25:27.819
What if someone had 20, 30 acres and they want to achieve these same natural processes?
00:25:27.980 --> 00:25:43.660
Uh they don't mind a bit of unplanned or unpredictable mess, and they've got their primitive fence, and so they just decide, look, we'll we'll have a couple of pigs in there for a month in the autumn, let's say, maybe fatteners, and and then we'll send them off for slaughter, or we'll send them back to where they came from.
00:25:43.819 --> 00:25:53.339
Or similarly, they maybe have two or three cows belong to my neighbour, bring them on, have them in the land just for a couple of weeks and or for as long as it takes, and then send them off, having done their thing.
00:25:53.500 --> 00:25:57.500
Does that also work, in your opinion, on a very small plot of land?
00:25:58.299 --> 00:26:04.620
So, in terms of my own experience or our own experience with this, Ben, we don't have a ring fence, and we can't afford to ring fence it.
00:26:04.700 --> 00:26:08.860
Um, it's something I will look at in time, getting to see if I can get funding to do that.
00:26:09.100 --> 00:26:11.980
My answer to that is yes, and it's something I've looked at.
00:26:12.140 --> 00:26:21.259
There's an issue with um cattle, and indeed our our mutual friend Sarah King from Rewilding Britain has just written quite a nice paper on this about herd dynamics.
00:26:21.500 --> 00:26:27.500
So cattle require a minimum of about six or seven animal animals to exercise herd dynamics.
00:26:27.660 --> 00:26:37.579
So if you bring on a herd that's too small, you're not replicating that herd dynamic issue or sort of dynamic for them, and that creates stress within the animal.
00:26:37.740 --> 00:26:39.180
So there's that limitation.
00:26:39.339 --> 00:26:49.100
I think the other thing you have is bringing on animals to the land that then have um uh pharmaceuticals in them, so where they've got wormers and things like that.
00:26:49.339 --> 00:27:01.660
So one of the things I'd thought about doing many years ago was going to a local stable and getting horse dung and bringing that onto the land and trailer loads and distributing that as a way of creating that sort of invertebrate assemblage.
00:27:01.740 --> 00:27:06.220
And as one of the ecologists I work with pointed out, it will have equine pharmaceuticals in it.
00:27:06.380 --> 00:27:14.700
So there's there's quite a lot of stuff to contemplate here about the you know, the sort of the provenance of the animals that you're bringing on, the numbers of the animals that you're bringing on.
00:27:14.860 --> 00:27:17.819
But in in principle, yes, is my response to that.
00:27:17.980 --> 00:27:20.140
And it's something I would like to move to.
00:27:20.779 --> 00:27:24.460
Yeah, I think I think the point about pharmaceuticals is is so important.
00:27:24.700 --> 00:27:33.019
I mean, I I I read recently that a single unwormed cow generates a quarter of its own body weight each year in invertebrate life.
00:27:33.100 --> 00:27:36.460
And we even put a wildlife cam on one cow pat.
00:27:36.779 --> 00:27:48.779
And it's absolutely heaving with with little invertebrates and dung beetles and all kinds of things, and it's visited by frogs and toads and woodcock and all kinds of blackbirds and songbirds.
00:27:48.940 --> 00:27:55.500
So it it's a really important part of the food web is to have cattle and their dung there, but not if they're wormed.
00:27:55.579 --> 00:28:04.460
And and one um natural England ecologist told me that their advice would be it's it's better, especially in wetland environments, to have no cattle at all than to have wormed ones.
00:28:04.779 --> 00:28:04.940
Yes.
00:28:05.259 --> 00:28:13.819
Jonathan, when I visited you last at Underhill Wood, the thing that struck me more than anything else, I think, was the magic of your hedges.
00:28:14.299 --> 00:28:16.299
I don't know if you still call them hedges.
00:28:16.539 --> 00:28:27.500
They're linear islands of scrub, they're kind of fat and provide all kinds of cover for songbirds and other wildlife, and they're, I guess, bounteous with berries and fruits in the winter.
00:28:27.980 --> 00:28:30.539
What's the story with the hedges on your land?
00:28:31.019 --> 00:28:32.620
Oh, Ben, how long have you got?
00:28:32.700 --> 00:28:34.700
Um, we'll have to do another pod for this.
00:28:34.860 --> 00:28:37.019
Um it it that's become a real thing.
00:28:37.180 --> 00:28:40.860
Like that's become something that I've really, really focused on, and for good reason.
00:28:41.019 --> 00:28:49.019
Um so there are a number of beautiful hedges, and in fact, we've just there somebody's writing a book about the hedges, the hedges of the land and the work that we do there.
00:28:49.180 --> 00:28:52.539
Um, and they're dating those hedges at at least 200 years old.
00:28:52.700 --> 00:28:58.940
So these are these are ancient, you know, these are good ancient structures on the land, and there are a number of them.
00:28:59.100 --> 00:29:02.779
And I wanted to do something with them, but I didn't know what.
00:29:02.860 --> 00:29:10.299
And one of the ecologists I work with talked me through a thing called conservation hedge lane, which I've now renamed as rough hedge lane.
00:29:10.460 --> 00:29:14.539
And so every year I hedge lay, do this rough hedge lane.
00:29:14.700 --> 00:29:16.940
I do it in about sort of 30-meter sections.
00:29:17.019 --> 00:29:25.180
I limit it to 30 meters because bats use hedges as flyways and they need those landscape markers.
00:29:25.500 --> 00:29:34.299
And what that gives rise to is just the most that that process of laying them gives rise to the most incredible pulse of wildlife.
00:29:34.539 --> 00:29:38.779
So a young graduate ecologist about how many years ago did Harry do this?
00:29:38.860 --> 00:29:43.980
About two or three years ago, three or four years ago, did uh his dissertation on our hedges.
00:29:44.299 --> 00:29:55.980
And there's the data's quite complex, but sort of rounding all the data up, what we're showing is you get a two-fold increase in invertebrate life in four years, which is just extraordinary.
00:29:56.140 --> 00:29:58.940
And this so this has become something I replicate all over the land.
00:29:59.100 --> 00:30:01.420
In fact, I'm going to do some hedge laying on Thursday.
00:30:01.500 --> 00:30:03.180
I'm going to lay another section.
00:30:03.339 --> 00:30:09.740
Um, and the goal is that I get all those hedges laid before I get too old, because there is a lot of them.
00:30:09.980 --> 00:30:11.900
And once they're done, I can leave them.
00:30:12.059 --> 00:30:14.620
You know, I I probably won't touch them again in my lifetime.
00:30:14.700 --> 00:30:16.299
I'll probably just leave them as they are.
00:30:16.460 --> 00:30:19.980
And I guess you know why a hedge is so important.
00:30:20.059 --> 00:30:30.940
So if we go back to our sort of prehistory when we had this sort of mosaic of scrubland, and indeed, through things like the Enclosures Act, all that scrub was cleared.
00:30:31.100 --> 00:30:34.539
The hedge is a proxy for all that scrubland.
00:30:34.700 --> 00:30:39.339
It's got the hawthorn, it's got the blackthorn, it's got holly, it's got wild rose.
00:30:39.420 --> 00:30:44.620
So all of those plants that were part of that mosaic landscape were gathered up accidentally.
00:30:44.779 --> 00:30:50.380
It's a really interesting accident of natural history to have all those plants gathered up in these linear strips.
00:30:50.700 --> 00:30:58.059
And so, you know, it's this very nice representation, this very nice sort of facsimile for this ancient ancient land that existed.
00:30:58.299 --> 00:31:03.579
And conservation hedge lane just is it's it completely is off the scale.
00:31:04.220 --> 00:31:08.779
I mean, your your hedges are just so different from what we're used to seeing in the English landscape.
00:31:09.819 --> 00:31:17.500
Most hedges nowadays are machine cut, um, which leaves them pretty bare and not great in terms of cover for wildlife.
00:31:17.579 --> 00:31:23.500
And of course, it deprives them of their berries, which only really start growing in the second or third year after they were last cut or laid.
00:31:23.660 --> 00:31:28.299
So this practice of laying them and then leaving them used to be ubiquitous.
00:31:28.460 --> 00:31:29.420
I mean, that's what farms did.
00:31:29.500 --> 00:31:39.180
They cut them and did so on roughly a nine or ten year cycle, and the result would have been these burgeoning fat hedges crisscrossing our landscapes as far as the eye could see.
00:31:39.420 --> 00:31:44.220
For me, I think that's one of the most important parts of what you do at Underhill Wood.
00:31:44.299 --> 00:31:49.819
And for me, that was kind of the magic source with these extraordinarily rich and diverse hedges.
00:31:49.980 --> 00:32:02.380
Although they didn't really look like hedges, they looked like these kind of battleships or kind of they look like kind of they look like kind of linear islands of kind of fat scrub crisscrossing your your beautiful plot of land.
00:32:02.539 --> 00:32:06.779
And Jonathan, when we go walking together on your place, you've always got a bucket of something or other.
00:32:06.860 --> 00:32:15.259
I mean, you're not you're not just doing stuff that is kind of changing the landscape, you're also feeding animals and doing things, which I think is probably part of the joy of it.
00:32:15.339 --> 00:32:18.299
You know, we we do that kind of stuff here in in Canwood.
00:32:18.460 --> 00:32:19.100
Tell me about that.
00:32:19.180 --> 00:32:23.500
What about the meat and the bones and those kind of things that you that you had in your hand when I was last there?
00:32:23.900 --> 00:32:25.420
Well, actually, I uh it's interesting.
00:32:25.579 --> 00:32:26.460
I got this from Isabella.
00:32:26.539 --> 00:32:28.539
I got this from Wildine, um, Isabella Tree.
00:32:28.700 --> 00:32:36.220
So one of the things that she laments in Wilding is the fact that they can't leave animals to to die in the landscape and to rot.
00:32:36.380 --> 00:32:46.700
And then I started reading some papers about the whole role of carcasses and some fantastic books about the role of carcasses and the cycle of life and the role they play.
00:32:46.940 --> 00:32:56.940
And if you look at sub-Saharan Africa, for example, a truly wild landscape, the carcasses play a fundamental role in the driving of those of those ecosystems.
00:32:57.180 --> 00:33:00.620
So it's me being the wolf, you know, it's me being the wolf.
00:33:00.700 --> 00:33:01.420
So I will stop.
00:33:01.579 --> 00:33:12.700
Actually, I had a fantastic experience not so long ago of being stuck on the A36 trying to get a row deer in the back of the car with everyone backed up and sort of, you know, beeping their horn at me and sort of abusing me as they drove past.
00:33:12.779 --> 00:33:16.940
Um and then I bring those animals onto the land, and sometimes it's really interesting this.
00:33:17.100 --> 00:33:19.980
Sometimes I leave them whole and I don't touch them.
00:33:20.220 --> 00:33:23.339
And what tends to happen then is invertebrates move in.
00:33:23.500 --> 00:33:27.259
But if I open them up, sometimes I do a bit of sort of basic butchery on them.
00:33:27.420 --> 00:33:39.500
Um then you get the badges and the robins, and so I put camera trail cameras on them and the magpies, and um and interestingly, you get things like buzzards will come deep into the woods um to scavenge on this.
00:33:39.660 --> 00:33:44.059
So that is something that's become a feature is bringing this stuff onto the land.
00:33:44.220 --> 00:33:49.740
And the interesting thing, Ben, I've been doing this now for eight years, I'm yet to find a single bone.
00:33:50.059 --> 00:33:51.339
So I I never find it.
00:33:51.500 --> 00:33:53.819
These things just completely vanish.
00:33:53.980 --> 00:33:54.940
I don't know where they go.
00:33:55.100 --> 00:34:01.500
I don't know where the skulls go, I don't know where the femurs go, I don't know where the pelvises go, I just never find a single bone.
00:34:01.740 --> 00:34:05.900
It just miraculously gets subsumed into the landscape.
00:34:06.700 --> 00:34:13.259
Jonathan, you you you've started doing webinars and other things to guide people on how to do rewilding at a smaller scale.
00:34:13.420 --> 00:34:26.299
Um I I really urge anyone listening to this podcast to look up the Underhill Wood Nature Reserve webinars and and and to read stuff that Jonathan's written because it's it's fascinating and it's joyful.
00:34:26.699 --> 00:34:52.460
And I think that you know if i if you could just give thought to one thing if you have savings and you want to invest them in something great, you know, a a a big cruise, or maybe a fast car, or the other kind of things that you might buy in retirement or whatever, think instead about buying 10 acres, five acres, twenty-five acres, fifty acres, somewhere not far from where you live, and creating magic in the way that Jonathan and Keggy have done.
00:34:52.619 --> 00:34:54.380
I mean, it is just extraordinary.
00:34:54.460 --> 00:34:57.900
If you're in the Dorset area, go and have a look at Underhill Wood Nature Reserve.
00:34:57.980 --> 00:35:00.219
Uh that they'll probably find a queue at the entrance now.
00:35:00.299 --> 00:35:01.739
It's becoming more and more well known.
00:35:01.980 --> 00:35:10.539
But it's uh it's uh certainly for me, I've been privileged enough to have a slice of land in South Somerset, and rewilding this land here has been really the joy of my life.
00:35:10.699 --> 00:35:13.339
And I know Jonathan feels the same about his plot.
00:35:13.500 --> 00:35:19.259
And um I urge you to give some thought to doing this yourself in whatever scale you can.
00:35:19.420 --> 00:35:27.259
Even a suburban garden is extremely important habitat for all kinds of species, and you can replicate these processes at a very, very small scale.
00:35:27.420 --> 00:35:31.579
Now, someone once said to me that all you really need are dead wood, scrub, and a bit of water.
00:35:31.819 --> 00:35:33.659
Well, add to those some of these dynamic processes.
00:35:33.900 --> 00:35:34.299
That's it.
00:35:34.860 --> 00:35:40.299
Yeah, and add to these some of these uh some of these dynamic processes, and you will create magic, and then you will sit in it.
00:35:40.380 --> 00:35:45.500
And who needs meditation or church when you can sit in a little patch of your own wild nature?
00:35:45.739 --> 00:35:48.459
Jonathan, thank you so much for giving me your time.
00:35:48.619 --> 00:35:50.139
I really love what you do.
00:35:50.299 --> 00:35:51.819
I love you and Keggy so much.
00:35:51.980 --> 00:35:56.139
I feel really privileged to call myself your friend, and I hope to see you very soon.
00:35:56.379 --> 00:35:58.219
Well, Ben has completely reciprocated.
00:35:58.379 --> 00:36:03.419
You're just you're an unrelenting in the best possible way champion for nature.
00:36:03.500 --> 00:36:05.819
And um, you know, I salute you uh for that.
00:36:06.059 --> 00:36:07.659
You know, you do extraordinary work.
00:36:07.819 --> 00:36:08.379
So thank you.
00:36:08.459 --> 00:36:10.939
And and and what a privilege to be put on this podcast.
00:36:11.099 --> 00:36:12.779
Amazing, just amazing.
00:36:26.139 --> 00:36:31.980
Some people are lucky enough to have a bit of land in which they can get busy restoring nature, rewilding.
00:36:32.219 --> 00:36:41.339
Some have got gardens, and Jonathan here has really been a pioneer of figuring out how to rewild such areas, and what a joy it is to have heard him describe it.
00:36:41.500 --> 00:36:43.500
But everyone can get involved in rewilding.
00:36:43.579 --> 00:36:46.699
There's loads of opportunities to volunteer and participate near you.
00:36:46.779 --> 00:36:48.779
Just look for them and you'll find them.
00:36:49.419 --> 00:36:56.939
If you've enjoyed the episode, please go onto whatever platform you use, give us a like, share it with your friends, it all makes a big difference.
00:36:57.099 --> 00:36:57.980
Thank you.
00:37:01.339 --> 00:37:13.980
In the next episode, I'm going to be talking to Melpo Apostoledu from Bird Life Cyprus, specifically about Melpo's project to reintroduce Griffon vultures to the island of Cyprus, bringing them in crates from Spain.
00:37:14.059 --> 00:37:15.259
It's an amazing project.
00:37:15.339 --> 00:37:16.859
I hope you'll join us.
